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I confess to initially being surprised by Holmes's retirement, though not overmuch. I had perceived a growing exhaustion in him for some time, a weariness that was new to his ways, a softening of his hard edges and a gradual breaking down of the walls he so carefully built around himself. Putting it down to age, and nothing too dissimilar than what I felt myself, I filled my customary position of partner and helpmeet, and provided support and assistance as I ever had.
Still, there is a great difference between realising this and being informed that one's long-term lover has purchased a cottage in Sussex and intends to move there.
I am ashamed to say that on this point we fought, one of the bitterest arguments in our long association. I accused Holmes of any number of things, including harbouring a desire to be rid of me that he would carry out his plan in this manner, and he, in turn, accused me of only being interested in him for our work. Two men so entwined as we two could only be angry with each other for so long, however, and in the end we brought the matter down to its bare bones: Holmes had entirely lost interest in continuing the work that had consumed him for more than two decades, though he was only fifty, and I was still years away from feeling ready to retire. We both had to admit, too, that to abandon my medical practice at this point, small as it was, and disappear into the country with Holmes would be to invite comment, as my career was in a comfortable place at that particular moment. We debated the matter for nearly a week before we reached what seemed the proper solution: for a time we would separate, I would continue to work in London, and in time I would join him. Meanwhile, I would spend as many weekends in Sussex with him as was possible.
It was not perfect. I know, for my part, that at times I was deeply lonely in London. Periodically, Holmes would ask me if I was ready to join him, and I would demur, as I still could not conceive of leaving my medical work behind. Soon, I would promise, and I meant it. I was beginning to tire of my work, and joining Holmes for good to quietly cogitate in the country for the rest of my days was becoming more inviting every day.
This arrangement lasted three years.
On a Friday in late July of 1907, Holmes met me at the Sussex train station, as was our custom. To my deep regret, we had missed the previous weekend, as I had been caught up with a dying patient and been unable to leave London. He greeted me in his dignified, supercilious way, while his fingers gripped my arm with a desperate affection. We soon hurried to the cottage where we could greet each other with the warmth we both felt, enjoyed a cold supper, and then settled down with drinks and tobacco to catch each other up on our respective weeks.
We spoke of Holmes's progress with his bees, and of my patients, and of old cases, and what little scribblings I had been working on. Presently, though, Holmes set his empty glass aside and sighed heavily. He lit two cigarettes, passed one to me, and fell silent.
"My dear fellow," I said, fondly. "If you don't mind my saying so, you look thoroughly done in tonight. Is something the matter?"
Holmes shifted on the sofa, where we sat together, into a further slump "Oh, Watson," he said, carelessly. "Watson, I have not told you the most singular bit of news to visit this region all week, or perhaps indeed all year. We had a murder."
"Good heavens." It was all I could think to say. Murder had become rather a remote topic for the both of us in the past three years, and there was something shocking in it returning. "Who was it?"
"Fitzroy McPherson. You never had the pleasure, Watson, but he was a teacher at the Gables. He staggered up to Stackhurst and I and died right in front of us." Holmes took a long pull on his cigarette, his eyes half-closed. "It was a bit of drama worthy of one of your stories. A pity you weren't here."
"He's the one you had occasionally been swimming with, is he not? My dear chap, I'm sorry." I had never heard Holmes speak of a murder so dispassionately, without so much interest. I passed my cigarette to my other hand so that I could wrap an arm around Holmes and pull him to me. He allowed this, though he gave another deep sigh. "I'm very much surprised you didn't telegram me to come down."
"I nearly did," he said. "The local constabulary of course enlisted my aid, and I of course was obliged to help, and the nearest thing I had to my Watson was Stackhurst."
I chuckled, despite myself. While it was normally no small miracle to me that Holmes had managed to become friendly with anyone who was neither myself nor a particularly admirable police inspector, I did not doubt that a schoolmaster had not filled my role very well. "And how is Stackhurst taking it?"
"He's badly shaken, I fear. In addition to the loss of his science teacher, he hasn't the stomach for the grotesque you and I do."
I ran my thumb along Holmes's shoulder. "Consulting detectives and army surgeons do see rather more of death than he normally would. Poor fellow. Do tell me what happened, would you?"
And Holmes sighed again, a long and despairing sound, and took a pull on his cigarette. I thought, involuntarily, of all the holidays we had taken over the years, some more coerced than others, where robbery or murder or scandal had suddenly seemed to find us. I thought of how he had seemed to ignite with energy on those occasions, a fire which would never be extinguished until he had followed the scent to its end, and seen the puzzle unravelled and justice done. I had loved to see it, even when I had also been despairing of his health. There was none of that now.
"Was it so very dull a murder?" I asked, when it seemed clear he wasn't about to tell me a thing.
He was quiet so long I had almost given up on having any answer at all, but presently, Holmes reached out and patted my knee. "It was worthy of the Strand. I'm almost sorry you won't be able to write it up. Perhaps I simply don't have the stomach for the grotesque anymore."
"Holmes?"
He grunted, and took one last drag on the cigarette before crushing it out furiously in the nearby ashtray. "Do you know what I thought, John? Do you know what I thought when I saw that poor fool die? I thought that I came here to escape exactly this but it has somehow followed me. I will never escape this thrice-damned mockery of everything that is good in the world, because the moment I find any degree of peace, someone must die and undo it all because Sherlock Holmes cannot exist without crime all around him, it seems."
He delivered this speech in a voice that was half-despairing, half-enraged, finishing on a bitten-back snarl. Alarmed, I reached to put out my own cigarette, and took both of Holmes's hands in mind. "Oh, my love."
"I am so tired of it all. I want no more crime, no more death, only my own little puzzles of chemistry and apicology and whatever else comes to mind, and I want you here with me because I cannot think, John, not without you by my side."
Two uses of my Christian name, so close together and without the context of the bedroom, was alarming. I gathered Holmes to me, and he curled inwards, his hands playing over my shirt buttons, but without the ardour that might be expected from the activity. There was something innocent, almost childlike in it, for all that he was a man of fifty-three. "I did want to tell you," I murmured, "that I had decided to sell my practice. It's only theoretical at this point. This is the first I'm saying it aloud to anyone, so perhaps the news is premature, but there it is. I have missed you terribly, you know. I feel as though I'm only truly alive on weekends, these days. " He mumbled something inaudible, and I ran my fingers through his greying hair. "This isn't just about that, though, is it?"
"Perhaps."
"You are not responsible for McPherson's death," I pointed out.
"Of course I'm not," Holmes said, rather sharply. "Do you think me a fool?"
"Never," I said. "But I confess I don't understand why this has affected you so. Is it the closeness to you that bothers you? Were you so friendly with him as all that? I hadn't realised. I am so sorry."
"Yes. No. I don't know." Holmes scowled, miserably. "This would never have bothered me in the old days, not like this. I think I had managed to convince myself that it was mere exhaustion that sent me out here, but I may have to conclude that I have turned sentimental in my dotage."
I thought about this for several moments, during which we two lay silent, Holmes still fidgeting with my shirt. "First," I said, "you are the furthest thing from being in your dotage that I can imagine."
"Watson–"
"Second," I interrupted, "you have not become sentimental."
"How can you possibly claim–"
"I can claim it–"
" I am the famous automaton devoid of the softer emotions, is that not what you've said–"
"Holmes–"
"Many times, to me and your adoring public both–"
" Would you let me speak, you terrible man, " I said, though without real heat. Thankfully, Holmes subsided, glowering at me. "You have not become sentimental. You have revealed how sentimental you always were."
Holmes left off with my shirt and sat up straighter, peering into my face with a fierce expression. His hands gripped my arms. "Explain," he said.
He was all tension, very nearly vibrating with suppressed emotion. I sighed, wanting very much to kiss him in an attempt to soothe, but I recognised that it would not be a gesture that would be received well just at the moment. "Holmes, we have known each other for a very long time. Will you allow that I know you well?" He nodded sharply, and I continued. "I have called you such things, and I regret it, because it was generally out of anger or frustration or ignorance. It has never been true. You give that impression, and I think you want to give that impression, but men without hearts do not behave as you do. Men without hearts do not go out of their way to horsewhip cads or object to rich men with evil designs on their governesses. Men without hearts do not risk arrest to stop blackmailers or hide criminals from the law in the name of mercy. There are a thousand careers you could have embarked on that would have satisfied your love of puzzles that did not involve taking on the burdens of strangers' problems. You can tell me you were only after the mental stimulation, or that it was art for art's sake, but I will not believe you."
He frowned. "Watson–"
"I have known you for twenty-six years, Holmes, and we have been through troubles that most men would not experience in several of their lifetimes. You cannot sit there and tell me that you never worked yourself into a froth over a vulnerable client you were not yet sure how to help, and that it was purely for the sake of being the one to solve their case. Perhaps you hide it less, but I refuse to believe it was never there in the first place."
Holmes looked at me, and then away, his face creased with a number of strong emotions: anger and shame primarily, but also something of regret mixed in. He was, I think, attempting to work out a way to tell me I was wrong, and failing, and hating that he was failing. He kissed my forehead in a distracted way, and settled back to sit down beside me again, a sag to his shoulders.
"Then, Doctor ," his tone was faintly acid, "if you are to diagnose me in this way, what has changed? When I was twenty-eight I never would have regretted a murder that found me, not like this. I would be sorry it happened, of course, but I would set my energies to righting it as best I could and I certainly would not be…I would not be moping like this, after the fact."
"I am not at all sure that I can be the one to answer that," I said, softly. "If I were to guess–"
"--a shocking habit–"
"--then I would say that it's merely that you are no longer twenty-eight, and you've seen more death and sin than you had then, and felt more about it, and perhaps these things are cumulative."
Holmes fell into a brown study for a time, pressed against me on the sofa while also not acknowledging me in any way. I waited, patiently, for him to come to some conclusion, as I always had. His fingers tapped out a quick staccato on his knee, and the clock over the mantlepiece ticked away, measuring out the minutes. At last, he said, "Why did you come with me when I invited you on the Jefferson Hope case?"
Of all the turns the conversation could have taken, I had not expected this one. "I beg your pardon?"
"You had already seen so much death, my dear, more than I had. We barely knew each other at that point. I was some half-crazed eccentric stranger who wanted to take you to a crime scene to show off how clever I was. Any sane man would have found new lodgings immediately."
"The easy answer for that," I said dryly, "is that I am no more sane than you are. Also, if you'll recall, I really did not have the resources to find other lodgings. In truth, though…" I sighed, thinking back. "Besides the fact that I, too, was very much younger then, I was not always finding it easy to adjust to civilian life again. Death was all I knew, or at least sometimes it felt like that, and revisiting that was an alternative to losing at cards and drinking myself to death. I never could resist a mystery, anyway, you know that."
Holmes returned my smile, and reached over to squeeze my thigh. "I think, perhaps, that you have always looked Death in the eye, unflinching, while I have attempted to shield myself from the full force of his gaze."
"Do you shield yourself, then?"
"Well. I used to be able to."
I let out a long breath. "You always built walls around yourself, even for me, sometimes. I have always known this. Is it so much harder now?"
"It is."
"Oh. Oh, my dear. I hadn't realised."
"I hadn't realised how poor I had become at the activity until McPherson's death. I have wanted you here so badly, Watson, you are my anchor, you are my one fixed point, and I needed you, and you weren't here, all for the sake of some damnable fiction that you are not – that we are not–"
He trailed off, his voice broken in a way that made my heart ache. "And I will never cease being sorry for it," I said. My voice had grown thick. "As I said, I'm ready to end the charade as well, I will speak to an agent at the first opportunity, and no you may not find some distant relation of yours to purchase my practice using your own money again, as that would defeat the purpose. You are everything to me, Sherlock. You know you are. A very great heart beats in that chest of yours, even if you attempt to keep it hidden."
He looked obscurely pleased for a moment, then abruptly rose to cross the room to the sideboard, where he fixed us a pair of fresh drinks. He presented one glass to me with elegant formality. "Here, my boy. Let us drink to the end of a charade, and in memory of a good man who died, and to a peaceful future in Sussex for two ageing madmen, who have seen too much death for any two souls to bear."
We toasted, and drank, and he kissed me again, and we tangled ourselves together on the sofa in hopes of many more similar evenings to come.
" Did you find McPherson's murderer?" I asked, after a time.
"Of course I did," Holmes sniffed.
"And?"
Holmes's face took on a faint look of impish glee. "My dear Watson, it was a jellyfish."